


Drabbling on about GHOSTS!

by Guardian_Rex



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Not Phantom Planet Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-25 08:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20373832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guardian_Rex/pseuds/Guardian_Rex
Summary: A small collection of drabbles, a new one to start with and maybe some from my ffn account to follow later if i remember and y'all wanna see em.





	1. Save The Amazonia

**Author's Note:**

> I promise, I'm working on Monstrous Chosen Spellslingers, go check chapter's 2 and 3 of it for some revisions you might notice, but for now have this little story that popped into my mind and solidified that caffiene = creativity juice

She is in Mexico when she finds it, the locket with the purple gem. It’s on a silver chain, and the seller has it among various other knick nacks and Sam needs to get at least one little trinket to show her mother that the trip was for more than just learning about the culture and seeing what she could use company money to help out with. After all, anything that didn’t involve improving one’s image was a waste of time to her mother and Sam only had so much leeway.

She overpays rather purposefully and puts it on once she’s back in her hotel room alone since it does look nice with her usual clothes. “A little accessorizing isn’t too bad.” When the clasp shuts behind her neck and the locket is in place, Sam feels something  _ Click. _ She remembers, faintly, when Tucker tossed out a theory that with how much ectoplasmic radiation they were hit with when the portal opened and how much bathed them when they entered without suits, they were bound to gain superpowers at some point themselves. Back when Danny mentioned that there might be countless artifacts out there that have ghostly properties that just need enough ectoplasm to charge up and activate.

The gem in the locket hums with energy and when she touches her desk the wood begins to sprout flowers. Pulling her hand away, Sam stares at them, and then at the gem. “Huh. Ok. I’ve dealt with weird shit before.” Sam focused on the gem, on the sensation of rolling waves and frigid ice and boiling lakes just above the life-giving volcanoes. She then imagined her clothes, peeking only a little at her mirror to make sure she had the image right and then twisted it. In a flash of purple, her clothes rewove themselves into something new. Long pants, long sleeves, a skulls and roses pattern all over of every cool color. Sam grinned and pulled on her magnetic boots and helmet. “Oh, this is gonna be great.”

Convincing Javier to make a detour further south was little problem. He knew how much she wanted to help people and also knew that she would’ve found a way there regardless of his help. So, they were soon on their way in the solar-powered plane she had commissioned from the Fentons toward Bolivia. “Hey Danny, Tucker, I have a minor surprise for you guys.”

“You’re on your plane,” Danny noted. “This is gonna be weird, isn’t it? You look like you’ve just found the most gothic thing possible.”

“Close. Do you remember us talking about how much ectoplasm is soaked into us and how magick stuff might just need enough ectoplasmic energy to kickstart itself?” Sam raised the silver encircled gem up to the camera with a grin.

“Holy shit,” Tucker said. “What does it do?”

“Well, from what I can tell it changes one thing into another. I plan to test it’s limit.”

“And how are you doing that, Sammy? Where are you going?”

“The lungs of the Earth are on fire Danny. The sky is literally black with clouds of smoke. Trees become carbon dioxide when burned, removing oxygen and poisoning the atmosphere. And so, I wondered to myself: if I can at least put out the fires - hush Danny, you knew I’d try somehow, this way I’m just likely to do it faster. If I can put out the fires, can I put back the trees? And I wanna see. Cause if I can, then I have to.”

Danny looked pensive for a long moment before letting out a sigh. “Tuck, do you have Amity?”

“I can manage while you two save the world, yeah.” Tucker held out his hand and called his scepter to his hand. “After all, I’m connected everywhere.”

“Sam, when you land, call me and I’ll be right over.” Sam raised a brow at him, skeptical. “I’ve been getting better at teleporting! And as long as you’re standing relatively still I can get to you guys no problem. Just gotta pull on the strings and let them carry me. I can help with putting out the fires.”

Sam shrugged, settling further into her seat. “If there’s anything you guys have taught me it’s that I should take the help I’m offered when I probably need it. So sure, I’ll do that. You just be ready to work your blueberry butt off mister.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Danny gave a salute and Sam shook her head, hanging up.

A few hours later, Sam landed and managed to get her board through customs. Sam waited until she was checked into her room, exercising a great deal of patience if she was asked. “Danny, get your ass over here. We have work to do.” A doorway to green swirly town opened up and then coalesced into the black and white jumpsuit and sky blue face of her best friend, faceplanting on the ground. “Wow, you actually managed it. Are you ok?” She pulled him up to his feet.”

“Turning into a cloud is weird, Sam. That was weird as hell. Let’s… let’s get this started and done with, yeah?” Sam put on her helmet and hopped onto her hoverboard. “Ready to go?”

“The helmet is insulating against the smoke, right?” Danny nodded. “Alright, let’s go.” Sam grabbed onto Danny’s hand, he slid them into that space between spaces and for the first time Sam doesn’t feel breathless. They soar above the city, into the clouds of smoke and darkness and death. They become solid and visible again and they fly out for countless minutes. Beneath them, the city is slowly replaced with the horrifying visage of burned away forest and charred animal carcasses and Sam pours on the speed.

They arrive above the flames and Sam reaches for her new amulet but Danny holds up a hand. “Hold on Sammy. I said I could help, and I have a feeling that whatever ecto energy is stored up in your body from being an Amity resident isn’t gonna cut it for uh. This. It’s a whole forest.” Danny floated a few feet away from her and grinned. “But hey, fire is heat energy and ectoplasm makes a great conductor.” Danny fell backward into the flames, and Sam watched as the roaring, hungry fire was pulled into a point that looked so small from where she was above the treetops that he was near invisible. But it would be impossible to miss the flames engulfing themselves, green lights flying outward in either direction to consume more and more of the fire. The air popped next to her as a vacuum was created and filled, Danny buzzing next to her. “Holy shit Sam, that’s…. A lot. This is a lot and I’m not sure how much I can handle all at once so you better be ready to move when the flames are out.”

Sam nodded, watching as the orange and red and black vanished, swept up in an expanding wave of green that moved faster and faster. Sam could see more and more duplicates than she’d ever seen Danny make pop into existence and winced.  _ Too much power to keep in a few bodies. _ Next to her, Danny's aura was flaring up in arcs like a star and his body glitched in and out of place. One second he was himself and the next he was a cloud of nebulous darkness and shadows dotted with stars that was pulling, tugging her in closer and there was so much to show her, so much to see! The next moment he was a star, bright and hot and causing the soundproofing on the helmet to kick in for her protection against the sound likely causing all the pressure that was pushing her backward in the air. Then he was Danny again, though buzzing and glitching here and there. Sam descended to the smoking area where Danny had fallen, beckoning him closer. “You’re about to explode.”

“ ** _There’s so much of it, Sammy, so much._ ** ”

“How close to done are you with the fire?” Sam was holding up her amulet in one hand and letting the other curl around the smoke rising from the charred ground.

“ ** _Real close, almost all of it, it’s just. There’s so much of it, Sam, I dunno if I can hold it in, it needs to be OUT._ ** ”

Sam nodded to the amulet. “Let’s get started, ghost boy.” Danny grabbed onto the gem directly and Sam let out a cascading waterfall of swears. Heat and light-filled her vision and Sam grasped onto the wisps of smoke and scrambled to focus on a single thought. For a moment she was everything, every atom out there, and she could become any individual thing or every little thing all smushed together.  _ Bring back the Amazon. _

With that order came yet another Click in the back of her skull.

Above the nearest cities, the sky was stained black, the air filled with poisonous gas from the raging fires. Moments before, green light had crested the horizon for those at the tops of the tallest buildings and images of flying figures - one recognized quickly by social media as the specter of Amity Park - combined with that green brought flutters of hope to the hearts of those who recognized ghostly light. The locals, however, felt hope when the black sky turned purple. Up above the earth blanketing miles upon miles of land, coal-black clouds of smoke were illuminated with purple light and  _ moved _ back toward the forest on a current they could not identify. The violet light spilled into the streets, filled the air, and drew from it the poison that had their children and elderly coughing up their lungs. Those closest to the burnt edges of the forest saw as the purple clouds descended upon the charred lungs of the Earth and ashen soil grew deep brown and vibrant greens once more. The rolling clouds of purple smoke withdrew to the edges of the fire and unfurled upon the land as renewed and returned foliage, outward faster than the fire had burned it down. As the flames died down, the Amazonia rose and the world could breathe deeply once more.

After a solid half-hour, the purple light dimmed within the gem and Sam managed to pry Danny’s fingers away from it. Bright white rings washed over Danny’s body and returned him to the disheveled form of Fenton, slumped against his friend under the sunlight filtered by the canopy of trees above them. Beaming and heaving her own labored breaths, Sam managed to get them above the trees and settled to sit there and rest, even taking off her helmet to look out around her. A laugh, light and genuine and triumphant, bubbled up out of Sam’s lips and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Danny grinned up at her, offering a thumbs up. “WE DID IT!”


	2. Digital Ideas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Local Teen Discovers the Endless Possibilities of Videogames

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is shorter than most things i do but if I went any further in depth with it, it'd be a Thing so like, here ya go

"So Danny, you fought Technus in Doomed, right? By like, jumping into the game?"

Danny looked up at Tucker from the floor where he was trying to beat ultra-hard mode of Horizon Zero Dawn. "Yes… why?"

"Can you go into a game and pull something out into the real world?" Danny tilted his head to the side, and were she not considering the possibilities herself Sam would've laughed at the equations she could see him running in his head. Danny lunged from the floor to his bed and gave Tucker a big kiss, already transforming. "Oh wow uh I'll uh. Keep the game going?"

"Babe, you're a genius, but Sam is going to do that while I go and grab something amazing." Danny handed his controller to the goth and she snorted. 

"Better bring back something cool ghost boy, and not just a rock." Sam unpaused the game and Danny focused. He slid between the real and the imagined and the place where thoughts and dreams buzzed and seeded themselves. He reached down where his custom made Horrorstation rested, and saw the game screen unfold before his eyes in even higher graphic detail. It called out to him, pulling him in, and Danny went with the current.

High above the ground, Danny manifested to the sight of Aloy taking on a Thunderjaw and decided to test out the range of the game. Aiming for the fuel cell on it's tail, Danny fired off a blast and was rewarded by green plasma tearing through thick plated armor and exposing power cores. He turned invisible and flew off toward the Nora Lands.

The best thing about going through a game three times was knowing landmarks. Through the dust storms and weaving around Glinthawk swarms, Danny found Mother's heart, and dove into the protected sacred mountain. After a few moments of rock, Danny saw air and solidified. "Cradle facility… where's the classroom?" It took a little flying around since he'd sped through this mission the last time, but Danny inevitably found the room he was looking for and passed through the metal as though it weren't there. The room was huge, several circular rows lined with cubicles holding consoles collecting dust and Danny's prize.

Grabbing his bounty, Danny let his focus slide to the thick silver cords that lead back to his boyfriend and best friend. One hand clasped around the prize and the other grabbing the threads, Danny pulled and was unbound by the semireality of the game. He raced through currents of energy and kept pulling until he was finally There, gold and green lighting up with red and tangerine surprise. Danny slotted back into physicality and flopped onto the floor. A foot nudged his head. 

"So, did it carry over?" Danny looked up at Tucker and opened his hand. Resting in Danny's glove were four triangular devices with LED lines from tip to rounded base, all no larger than a Bluetooth. "I am a genius!"

"Then you can help Danny dissect one to make more of them. Danny that's amazing! Imagine what you can do with this kind of ability!"

"Oh I'm imagining, Sam." Danny grinned, thinking of all his sci-fi games. "I have a few ideas."


	3. Book Rants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edward Lancer hears someone ranting about not understanding or liking a book (or disagreeing with its message, your choice). As it is 10:34pm on a Thursday and he's taking a quick stroll back from the coffee shop where he had finished his grading, he decides to investigate. He did not expect to find Phantom pacing in the air and waving wildly as he talked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to aedelia on tumblr for this prompt! it was fun to write!

The night air was cool, and the street clear of most foot traffic and normal traffic. His tea was warm in the thermos against his hand, papers graded in his briefcase, and Edward found himself feeling rather content that Thursday evening. So, when he heard a vaguely familiar voice proclaim, “most ridiculous book I’ve ever read,” he decided that he might as well fill the time between now and his heading to bed with a bit of conversation. Freshmen English papers weren’t exactly the most exciting things to keep one up at night after all.

Heading in the direction of the voice, Edward found himself catching the moonlight glow of Danny Phantom’s aura casting odd shadows and lights across the grass and trees of the park while he hovered in the air and glared at a book. “I don’t get it, what’s the damn point of it? Aren’t stories about petty revenge supposed to come with a moral?”

“Not necessarily, Mr. Phantom.” Phantom spun around in a fluid motion that had his face sliding into place where the back of his head was before the rest of him turned and Edward did his best to quell the shiver that ran down his spine at the sight. Being a ghost must’ve dulled Phantom’s awareness of body horror. “Sorry to startle you.”

“That’s ok,” he said quietly, chuckling. “I don’t typically  _ spook _ so easily.”

“I’m certain you don’t,” Edward sighed. “If I may ask, Mr. Phantom, what story were you referring to?”

Phantom blinked a few times and tilted his head, then held up a book slowly. “ The Cask of Amontillado. I don’t get what the point is.” Phantom huffed, shaking the book as though doing so would intimidate meaning from its contents. “A guy starves his friend to death by tricking him into thinking he’s gonna taste test a bunch of wine because he thinks he was insulted. There’s no lesson I can think of besides ‘don’t trust rich people’ which anyone should know anyways.”

“Mmm.” Edward chuckled and shook his head at the pout on the powerful ghostly hero that protected the town. “Have you considered, Mr. Phantom, that the story’s point is just how messed up it’d be if that happened?” Phantom stared at him, perplexed, and Edward laughed. “Have you ever seen the Twilight Zone?”

“A few episodes, yeah.”

“Are there morals to those stories?”

“Uh… some of them?” That was an interesting piece of information to have about their resident guardian. As was the fact that he read in his spare time.

“The majority, however, those have a very simple moral to them, which is that they have no moral.”

“I- yeah, there’s a few that are just ‘wouldn’t that be fucked up’ but I didn’t think some ‘classic literature’ would be like that. Or that an English teacher would ever admit that there wasn’t any real hidden meaning to it all in a book. Isn’t that your job, to find something that’s not really there?”

Edward snorted and shook his head. “A common misconception amount students, I assure you.” He took a sip of his tea and Phantom flicked his wrist. A chair woven out of ectoplasm and light appeared beside the vice principal and Phantom did a little fist pump.

“Feel free to convince me otherwise.” Well, a chance to chat with the resident hero was hardly something most people got. So he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for how short it is, I'm not very sure of Lancer's Voice. Hope you enjoyed!


	4. Hysterics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do you ever get tired of being nice? don't you wanna just go apeshit?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we all need a little over powered Danny in our lives, don't we?

The metaphysical energy filling the Infinite Realms was endless and infinite. The soul was equally endless. A ghost, that is a soul bound with ectoplasm charged with metaphysical energy, could eventually do everything and anything once they were a ghost for long enough. They grew exponentially in power, and some were embodiments of the countless realms themselves. Clockwork, one of the eldest ghosts that still existed, was now able to halt the flow of time across the whole of an entire Realm and rewind it back to the infinitesimal point of heat and light and energy that it originated as if they so desired.

Daniel James Fenton was a very young ghost, his soul and ectoplasm bound inextricably to his body which was  _ not _ infinite.

Hysterical strength was the phenomenon in which a living being’s brain and body have been pushed to their very limits and they find themselves able to utilize every ounce of strength they have at their disposal. Mothers have lifted cars, men have defeated polar bears, and all the like with this strength. It is a last-ditch effort of the body, however, as giving all you have can mean destroying yourself to do it.

Daniel Sauel Phantom did not have muscles to tear and was in fact simply comprised of emotion and soul and energy. The star that exploded before eventually becoming the sun had a ghost as much as any living being does, before a doorway was opened within it and within a human boy.

Tucker Foley, Samantha Manson and Jasmine Fenton all lay dead at Danny’s feet. His ghostly power was drained and there was no strength left in his muscles. He should, for all purposes, be unconscious. He was, however, achingly awake. There were limitations to what the human mind could experience before something broke. Danny was not angry, was not furious, was not livid. There was no word in any mortal tongue that could describe the feeling that filled Danny up like an ocean poured into an eyedropper. The GIW agents surrounding Danny and his loved ones held their weapons ready to fire on him and end his existence, and he was very aware of them because they had killed his most precious and dearest people.

Black hair bled white, tan skin turned ashen turned blue, turned black. Tears, hot and bitter and pained, fell from his eyes and turned to steam before they hit the corpses around him. Everywhere around him the ectoweapons of the GIW lost power and energy surged within Danny as his soul reached blindly into the vast abyss of power that he was, and he opened his mouth. The discordant sound of uncountable bells of every size and shape and material being struck rang through the air and lines of points of light and fire raced across his body. He  _ burned _ and those damned  **bastards in white** would burn with him. The body could hold only so much emotion but the soul had no such limits and his body could not handle so much power but he couldn’t care. There was no room in him left to  _ care _ .

Amity Park went dark and the Earth’s crust rang like a bell struck, the sky blackened like night and streaks of lightning crisscrossed it like veins. The heat that burned within him burned outward and he screamed and screamed and  ** _screamed_ ** . Gravity swelled and fluctuated and twisted, lightning surged from the inferno of pain that he was, tendrils of fire that were his arms whipped out and struck down agents and helicopters and tanks. Agents froze, burned, were shocked into nothing but ash and guts crushed into piles of nothing, ripped apart molecule by molecule by antigravity, consumed by darkness and cast into the void beyond, blinded by the light and unmade.

Danny was, in that moment, the destructive force he’d never wanted to become. He didn’t care though, because Jazz, Tucker, and Sam were  **dead.** The ghost hunters wanted a monster of a ghost so they got one. It was simple.

They wouldn’t want this, though. They’d be so disappointed when they found out he did this. That he had so much power at his disposal and he used it to destroy instead of create. And that’s when he felt it, saw it, heard it, and he found room for something other than indescribable pain in his soul. He felt the strings tying him to his loved ones and he realized that he was a  _ star _ and stars were the sources of  _ Life _ .

Turning his attention away from the agents and his Slaughter, the wailing ghost focused on his friends, his family, his heart, and reached out to them. He felt along the bonds and reached into their bodies and he  _ pulled _ . Every ounce of power he could focus on poured into their bodies and he pulled on the bonds that connected them. They could call him to them at any moment through them, so why not the other way around?

The light Danny produced in his wailing rage of wanton random destruction was blinding but what he did next knocked out quite a few of the remaining living humans and ghosts. When the light faded, the dust cleared, and the storms and quaking stopped as suddenly as it had come, there sat Danny Phantom at the center of the crater he’d created, holding three people in his arms who were arguably conscious. Tucker Foley, with circuit lines crisscrossing his skin and glowing like lightning; Sam Manson with flowers and vines and green things growing from and along her skin all around her and hair rippling like shadows; Jazz Fenton with a third eye on her forehead, and another on the back of her hands, and likely more in places that eyes generally shouldn’t be. But that didn’t matter to Danny, not right then. He was filled up with more joy than his body could keep in one place, crying hard enough to shake, and clinging to them like life itself.


	5. Sanctuary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> According to Sydney, a ghost had to make their own Sanctuary and it was usually their way of coping with being dead. Thus, mostly other ghosts were unlikely to go into someone else's Sanctuary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, I wrote this up and thought 'hey, people might enjoy it' so here we go! Interior designer Danny James Saeul Fenton Phantom

Danny had been on somewhat of a hyper fixation spiral since Sydney had explained how Sanctuaries work in the Infinite Realms. You make one from the surrounding ectoplasm and it’s  _ your _ place. Only assholes will invade your sanctuary without permission and you have every right to fight them over it. Danny acknowledged that ghosts were people, and like people, he didn’t want them just waltzing into his house because the only nearby door to Earth was in it.

So, Danny had taken a blank sketchbook, let some of that ghostly energy flow into his mind, and considered how he wanted his sanctuary to look. It took weeks of drawing, of looking up pictures of the ISS, going to that abandoned observatory at that one hill, going with Sam on a trip to a jungle (he’d learned that bugs were discouraged from being near him if he let out little pulses of energy) and his own hike through Amity’s woods. He found himself tugged and drawn toward so many places for inspiration it shocked him. He drew server rooms, a room for nothing but videogames, a movie theater, a bowling alley. The library, the arcade, that coffee shop Sam liked that sold weird books, the park, Danny filled his sketchbook up and up and up (it shouldn’t have this many pages in it but his life was so strange he didn’t even notice that).

A month after Danny had come up with this plan, he was in a pottery class, learning how the process of molding clay at your fingertips felt and worked. He had to leave to fight ghosts, yes, but he was  _ learning _ and the art of turning a pile of mush into  _ something new _ made something in Danny sing. 

Walking through the portal always brought back the most awful memories, but he soldiered on because this? It was important. Danny sat in front of the portal on the other side, surrounded by dark void and glowing green, blue, indigo, and violet mist (it was those colors and more, it was all the colors human eyes could not see). He lay one hand on his sketchbook, closed his eyes, breathed in, and let his energy flow outward. Immediately the mists pulsed and ebbed and flowed and danced to the tune of his core and Danny imagined himself drawing and molding at the same time. His aura shone brighter and brighter, and around the portal formed steel and stone, which extended upward, downward, outward. For an age, Danny let himself get lost in the sheer art of  ** _creation_ ** and the world around him hummed and thrummed as it was pulled closer together and twisted and stretched and aligned just so.

As a favor to a boy they would not know personally for some time, she twisted the dilation of Time around the Fenton Portal relative to Earth. Thanks to him, an hour would pass in that material Realm while Danny was lost in an obsession he didn’t even know he had - creating. Ectoplasm and the Soul both were infinite and as such Danny wove together the most beautiful tapestry he could without pause.

When Danny finally opened his eyes and the burning power ebbed back into his still ringing core, he was inside of a room. It was his workshop back home, or a replica of it, instead of his parents’ lab, though the portal was right where it was in the lab of course. He let his feet rest on the smooth linoleum or at least what he thought might be linoleum, and hummed. He walked over to the stairs and ascended, noting that artifact storage and weapon storage were both there. The kitchen, however, was very different. It was like something out a professional restaurant, every surface looking beautifully clean with knives and spoons and measuring tools and bowls and everything one could wish for to cook a five-star meal with littering the place. Meals he cooked with his dad, disasters he’d helped his mom and sister either make or destroy, Tucker and his mom’s home cooking, Agatha’s wonders all came to mind and Danny grinned. There was enough room for all of them to work together on something here.

The living room had couches, beanbag chairs, and very well cushioned chairs everywhere, the carpet feeling like a soft moss under his toes when he took off his boots and the walls and ceiling covered in murals of a forest under a starry night sky. When Danny flicked his fingers, a holographic screen appeared in the air and he beamed. Scrolling around quickly showed that signals were caught rather easily through the portal and he could connect to the internet or to any version of a cable package on Earth. “Tucker will  _ love _ this.” That thought, of course, led Danny deeper into the house, to the stairs and up them toward a room. Crisscrossing the room were lines like circuits, gold, green, and red the theme of the room. It appeared a cross between a lab and a living room.

The largest feature was a sunken area in the middle of the floor that housed a circular bank of computers, as well as a bolted and padded chair that spun in a circle to reach every screen. Over to one side was a table with a sewing machine, countless pieces of fabric off on a shelf nearby. To the other side was a table with an entire DnD map on it, miniatures laid out waiting to take form. To one side as well there was a cabinet next to a refrigerator and a freezer, all labeled ‘chemicals’, and wow, Danny should probably check what  _ those _ were. He knew Tucker was starting to dabble in chemistry but anything made from ectoplasm was probably dangerous to go experimenting with. The dartboard in the visage of a computerized eye was, in Danny’s humble opinion, a nice touch on his part.

“Well, there’s only one other door here besides the entrance and I’m gonna bet that’s like, an extra bedroom. So, let’s see what else we’ve got here.” Danny floated down the halls and hummed when he found a door made of polished obsidian with streaks of thread woven around it. He pulled open the door and chuckled. “Wow. plants everywhere, spider silk all over the place, black and purple with rebellion posters. I wonder who this room is for.” Danny floated up to the ceiling when he caught an odd glint and raised a brow at the cameras hovering in a strange formation. But then he pulled back down and snorted when he realized they were arranged like the eyes of a spider. There was a door labeled dark room where only a red light could be seen and when Danny touched the floor with his hand he found that it absolutely was some kind of moss. “I wonder how alive anything I like, willed into existence around here, can be. Is this real moss feeding on the ambient energy in Realms or does it just look and feel like that cause I thought it was thematically appropriate?”

Deciding that was best left for later, Danny flew off down the hall and up the winding stairs once more, finding himself suddenly in a library that seemed to go on and on in all directions. Shelves upon shelves that towered twice his height littered this floor so far like a maze that Danny couldn’t tell if there was an end made of true walls or if that second floor ringed with a brass balcony was supported by yet more bookshelves. Couches and chairs and tables were scattered all around, and the carpet was a soft lilac with orange and blue eye patterns repeating all over it. “This doesn’t feel like Sam or Tuck… it feels like Jazz. Wow, the rooms really  _ feel _ like them. Ok, Fenton, don’t get too wrapped up in that. Ghost stuff is weird and you’ve felt and seen what your friends’ aurae are like before. This is just a whole nother level of it, in your own personal afterlife home.”

Spinning around the spiral staircase once he found it up to the very top of the building found Danny in an observatory, to understate. There was a telescope that looked out and up into the void toward the dots and pinpricks of light that hinted at the spirits of stars shining in the distance. The walls were all made of glass - likely one-way glass - and each was a different color, each reflecting a different view of  _ somewhere _ on Earth. Most of them showed Amity, the places he went to most frequently, and the places he had to protect most often, but there was also a view of the whole of NASA’s facilities, the night sky, the biggest planetarium in the world, etcetera. Danny felt tears rising to his eyes, blurring his vision. “This is beautiful…”

On one table was a map, shifting and changing like waves on the ocean, which showed all the places that Danny had been in the Infinite Realms. There was a door that led to a room filled with easels, canvas, paint, brushes, pencils, paper, everything he could ever crave for drawing and molding art from clay and ink and paper. A flick of his fingers brought up a hologram when he got close to some speakers and every song he’d ever listened to was there, somehow in full even when his memories had faded of the lyrics and names.

“Alright. Ok, I can’t- I can’t stay here or I’ll never leave. I have to bring Tucker and Sam to see this.” Danny looked out a window, this one opening up onto a balcony, and he gasped. Stretching out for at least a mile or three was violet stone under several buildings. It looked for all the world like a town surrounding his house, with a forest and wood surrounding that town. “Holy shit. Yeah, I gotta show Tucker and Sam.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey there! If you enjoyed this, feel free to tell me and also please please share it wherever you share things you like!


	6. Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Fentons are inventors, Sam has money, and team phantom would like them distracted from making anti Danny weapons

Dr. Jack William Fenton and Dr. Madelline Walker Fenton were both scientists and inventors. While they would never admit it, the Mansons used plenty of the finished products produced by Fentonworks to replace already existing modern conveniences - the steam cleaner, the microwave, their solar-powered jet were all innovations of the Drs. Fenton. So, truly, it baffled Sam that it had taken her so very long to come up with an easy and simple way of keeping them too busy to act on their ghost hating biases and put her money to some actual worthwhile usage. It was simple, truly.

“Hey, Drs. Fenton, I know you see me as a friend of your son’s and all that, which I am, but I also come to you today as a customer. You’re inventors, right?” The two scientists looked up from the gun they were making right on the kitchen table to stare at her, Jack with a broad grin and Maddie with a raised brow.

“That we are, Sam! What can we do ya for?”

“Well, I was thinking that several of the problems we all face today could be solved with just a bit of the Fenton touch. Most scientists tackling the problem are having a hard time coming up with something that can handle the strain of containing and distributing all the energy we can receive from the sun but I feel like you guys can manage something as small as that. After all, you proved that life after death is real.” The stare of the scientists was assessing, calculating, and went through her as they both got to work considering how they might achieve that in a commercially viable way. Hook, Line…

“How much are you willing to pay for that, Sam?” Sinker. Sam pulled out a credit card and they talked business. Soon, she headed up to Danny’s room to celebrate with the boys about a pair of Fentons well distracted and the world a step closer to being clean.

* * *

“So, Dr. Fenton, you know about the Red Huntress, correct?” The question came at random it felt like, and Jack looked up from the action figures of himself and that dastardly Phantom he’d been playing with at Sam Manson. She’d been happy enough with the power cell they’d given her, they’d even installed it in the building she had apparently been getting renovated. What could she possibly want now?

“That I do, Sam! What about her?”

“Well, I was thinking about her hoverboard and thining ‘hey, the Fentons have that Specter Speeder, they know how to make things that fly’ and wondering if you could make something like that hoverboard? Maybe even better if you’re up for the challenge?” Other people would probably consider the safety risks of giving a teenager the power of flight, but Jack Fenton simply started doing the math in his head and rummaging through his pockets for the tools necessary.

“Of course I can! No one’s made hover technology that a Fenton can’t match!”

* * *

Sam had to admit, as much as she wasn’t a fan of the Fentons’ anti-ghost views, she did like when their weapons worked. For this one in particular, she headed to one Maddie Fenton while she worked on the Boomerang. “Hey, Dr. Fenton? I was thinking about how I typically respond to an attack on my person.” Sam pulled out a cylinder from her pocket and flicked a switch, extending her bo staff to it’s full size. This had Maddie’s attention. 

“This won’t work on a ghost, though, no matter how good I am. I was hoping you’d be able to make me something that I can carry with me that’s a bit more… effective?” Maddie’s eyes lit up and Sam’s smile was genuine.

* * *

“MOM, DAD!” Danny practically screamed, prompting his parents to thunder up from the lab weapons blazing in case he was hurt. He was not, in fact, hurt and instead pouting furiously. “Tucker is implying that there are limits to our scientific capacity.”

“There  _ are _ limits, Danny, no-one ca-”

“He says,” Danny shouts over his best friend, pulling his baret down over his face. “That there’s no way we can figure out a way to contain a fusion reaction, even though it’s possible to make one happen.”

“There is  _ nothing on Earth _ capable of holding in all that energy!”

“Nonsense!” Jack said, hardly hiding the laugh in his voice over the boys’ antics. “I’m certain we’ve got something for that.”

“Well, nothing  _ Earthly _ can manage that, but we can check the other portals and get to work on a blueprint,” Mads said, pulling out a tablet and scrolling through it to find which floor they needed to head to for this. Jack, meanwhile, pulled his own out to start running the calculations and drawing up blueprints in his head.

“What do you mean ‘other portals’?” Danny asked, sounding less enthused than before. Jack looked up with a furrow to his brow and shared a look with Maddie.

“We told them, right?”

“We might not have. Sorry, hon, your dad and I forgot to tell you and Jazz: we’ve had a few other portal attempts in our days and while none of them led to the Ghost Zone they did lead to other interesting places!”

“Can we make a portal to the moon?” Danny spoke so fast Jack nearly missed the words. But when he gave a thumbs up his son made some kinda noise and charged for the lab.

Sometimes it paid to be a doctor in weird sciences in more than just money.


	7. Cults

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whenever Danny went to the past and was seen by others, the moment he came back to the present there were these weird threads sticking to him. they didn't seem to do anything and nothing bad was happening - heck he felt stronger every time he saw new ones actually. Still, he was curious as to what they were

It started when Danny first came back from the Infinimap event. He felt the tug and pull of  _ something _ on his core, some kind of… tingling? He wasn’t sure how to explain it. But among the whole ‘the Infinite Realms both do and do not exist at every feasible and non-feasible point in space and time across the whole multiverse’ revelation it wasn’t exactly something that Danny was focusing on. Instead, he was making sure Sam and Tucker’s heads didn’t explode with jokes to distract them. “Thanks for eating your veggies for the first time in your whole life, Tuck.”

Tucker rolled his eyes and elbowed him in his ribs. “Yeah, you owe me for that. I’ll take all your best copies of videogames.”

“How about you name three videogames and I’ll get them for you,” Sam countered. “You really did save our butts back there. And so did you, Danny.”

“Yeah yeah, who else is gonna do it if I don’t?” They laughed, there was ribbing, and the day went on.

After that, however, Danny found himself stumbling through natural portals more and more often whenever he went into the Zone. they lead to the past, often, and he found himself helping people out as much as he could before another portal could be found and he could find his way back to the Fenton Portal or at least to Frostbite or Dora or wherever he’d been planning to go. Tucker and Sam, of course, got caught up in it too. That wasn’t even the weirdest part though.

Every time Danny returned to the present day after a time-traveling shenanigan he felt  _ stronger. _ As soon as he set foot on Earth, blue and silver threads of light reached out from him into the world, pulsing with energy, and Danny felt less tired, less weighed down by everything. He’d explained it to Sam and Tucker and saw that he even had these threads leading to them, though the strands leading to them were different. Tucker’s was golden and silver and UV orange, while Sam’s was green and silver and black. There was even one leading back to Jazz, violet and white and blurple. Sam said Blurple wasn’t a color, but Danny said that  _ she _ couldn’t see in Ultra Violet so she didn’t get to name the colors in the spectrum. She bought a blacklight soon after.

The oddest thing, however, was when he saw people in the street walking to the Nasty Burger or to the library or park that the strings connected to. Usually, the blue ones, though sometimes it was the silver ones. When he passed by one such person, a guy in black pants and white jacket with sunglasses on, Danny reached out to wrap his fingers around that thread between them and narrowed his eyes when it felt like a tangible thing. So he pulled on it. The man stumbled a bit, lifting his sunglasses to look around - mostly up at the sky - and Danny snickered. Once he was a distance away from the man he started tugging on the other strings, gently at first but then he got curious. One of the blue threads held an extra green sparkle to it, and Danny weighed his choices and options carefully, making the most educa- he yanked on the glowing green invisible string coming from his core out into the world to see what happened.

The air in front of him twisted, light shifting around until it was purple and green and everything in between and a guy with pale green skin, oily purple hair and bright green eyes fell through the portal, floating over the sidewalk in an outfit befitting the 70s more than it did the millennium. The portal hovered open behind him and everyone on the sidewalk stopped, staring at the ghost, who was staring at Danny slackjawed and wide-eyed. “I’m gonna ask that you please go back into the Realms, I  _ really _ don’t wanna deal with this right now.” More gazes shifted to Danny for that but really, he had to  _ try _ to solve his problems with words at least once or twice, right?

The ghost looked down at the thread between them - wonderful, ghosts could  _ see _ that, that was just fanfreakintastic - and then back up at Danny. Then he nodded, seemingly in shock, and floated backwards into the portal from whence he came. It snapped closed behind him and Danny blinked a couple of times. “I didn’t think asking nicely would work. I’ll have to tell Mom about that.” Now, Danny simply had to perform the task of becoming metaphorically invisible instead of literally. This proved difficult, however, as everyone ID’d him as The Fenton Kid pretty easily. He pulled out his phone, dialed Tucker, and ignored the stares best he could.

After the mishap in the streets, Danny noticed a new thread form in real-time, blue and sharply visible, as though daring him not to see it. When he got to school the next day, he saw that it lead back to Dash fucking Baxter of all people - who was showing off something as usual. When the trio made it through enough of the crowd to see  _ what _ Dash had done that connected Danny to him like that, they saw a tattoo of Danny’s DP symbol inked onto reddish-pink raw skin. Danny let out a hum and wrapped his fingers around that string, tugging gently and watching as the tattoo  _ glowed _ bright enough for everyone to see it. “Holy shit, I just  _ felt _ that. It’s like Phantom pulled on me!”

“Whoa, dude! What if like, wearing Phantom’s symbol connects you to him somehow?” Oh, how Danny hated that Kwan was so much smarter than Dash and yet so easily lead by him. “Oh, hey, maybe you can like, pull back?”

“Perhaps if I get a tattoo myself then my ghost boy will always know where I am so that he can find me for a date!”

Danny would’ve paid any mind to the rest of the chatter around Dash had he not been floored by a tug from the other side of this newfound and unwanted connection.  **Warmth appreciation caution excitement** echoed like words in a cave, searching for someone to hear but not close enough to truly communicate. Danny took a deep breath, holding onto Tucker’s shoulder for support, and carefully pulled his attention away from Dash trying to get it. “Save me.”

“They’re gonna start a cult,” Sam said with poorly concealed mirth. “Oh my gosh, this is going to spiral disastrously out of control and it’ll be hilarious.”

“Sam, I’m about to have a bunch of jock thoughts beamed into my head, and you’re laughing at me.” He sighed, rolling his eyes. “With my luck, they’ll try and make an official religion around me.”

Tucker snorted and shook his head, tapping away at his PDA. “Ya know what’d be really funny? What if all those extra threads are like, cults that worship you?” Tucker laughed at the idea, and Danny did too for a moment, elbowing him gently in the side. Sam, however, was not laughing, and once Danny noticed that he stopped laughing as well.

“Sam?”

“You said that you first saw these threads when we went time traveling around, right?”

“Yeah, every time we go to the past and someone sees us do stuff there’s more weird strings. They don’t pop up when we come back and didn’t get caught though.”

“So when you and Vlad fought over Rome and burned it down, and fought in that one temple and near destroyed it…”

“Oh, holy shit. Hold on Sam, I gotta check.” Tucker tapped away at his PDA at speeds that Sam informed Danny were not normal. He wanted to pretend he didn’t understand what they were getting at, revel in the bliss of ignorance and all that, but he was getting less oblivious these days - he  _ was _ he swore.

“Guys, the cult joke isn’t going too far now, is it?” Tucker hummed at him, and Sam started walking toward class, dragging them both behind her. “Guys, this isn’t funny anymore!” Honestly, Danny had every right to be whiny about this. He fought eldritch abominations every day, he didn’t need to have a cult to deal with too.

“Wow, that’s a lotta results. You’ve been seen in the past by a lot of people - me n Sam too. Maybe that ghost you summoned was like, one of your cultists who died?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Sam half sang. “Someone’s gotta hold a seance and ask a ghost a question.”

“Sam, please, we’ve asked enough ghosts enough questions without dragging them here from their afterlives.” His friends were laughing at him now, which lead to yet pettier whines. “What would I even  _ do _ about this if I have a cult?”


	8. The Story Teller

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trio head through the portal to explore Danny's brand spanking new Sanctuary and are a little awed by all that he managed to make. They meet a facinating new ghost, who has a deal for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised on Tumblr, I bring to you my lore dumping!

When Danny took Sam and Tucker through the portal and into his Sanctuary, he was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one floored by how much of it there was, or how complex it had turned out. “I don’t think I’ve ever even made a drawing this complicated and detailed before,” he said as they reached the roof of the main portal building and house. It was at the heart of what looked to be a town or maybe even a city, which was surrounded by a dense forest, with a mountain to one side, a massive body of water that Danny would call a lake but that looked so vast an ocean felt more appropriate on the other, and even misty clouds of every kind of color he could see passing by a point of brilliant light. “I’m glad it’s been keeping Walker out as much as it has, and every other ghost too. That means we can  _ explore _ it!”

“Danny, this place is magnificent!” Tucker wrapped him up in a tight hug and squeezed nearly hard enough to crack his back. “Dude, you made a whole ass  _ town _ that’s almost as big as Amity Park! I wonder how stocked up this place is. You’ve got copies of our hoverboards here too, so what are we waiting for?”

“I say we take a look at that forest, it’s practically screaming ‘enchanted and full of mystery’, and maybe we can even figure out what all goes on in that head of yours.” Sam poked Danny’s head with a laugh and called up her own backup hoverboard, hopping over the ledge and onto it before Tucker could catch up. Tucker, of course, swerved off to see if he could find anything substantial in the town, which meant splitting up, which had Danny reaching out to grab them both.

“Guys hold up! Are we  _ really _ gonna go into a freshly made place that I made mostly subconsciously while in  _ ghost form _ and do it while splitting up? Are we the Scooby gang?”

“Take full offense from this but you’re baby,” Tucker said with a snort. “Your subconscious mind didn’t come up with anything that might hurt us.”

“Maybe not on purpose, but I might’ve made some parts of this place uninhabitable to regular humans, but perfectly safe for a ghost to be floating around in.” After all, a ghostly mind set deeply into a Passion could easily forget things like safety regulations for squishy humans. Young Blood wasn’t even malicious or Obsessive and look at how he’d turned out.

Sam rolled her eyes but circled back around to the boys. “Fine, we can stick together and tour your McMansion together, you lil show off, but if so then how about we take a look at the edges to see what we can learn about how well defended this place is? It’s meant to be your Sanctuary, so you’ve gotta have  _ some _ way of keeping ghosts out without just shotting at them.”

“We can work our way through the town and out into the forest, guys, you know that right? We’re literally starting from the middle.” Danny sighed, shaking his head. “The defenses are clearly working because nothing’s actually  _ done _ anything to us yet, they can wait.”

It took a bit of back and forth but eventually, they all decided on a direction to go and headed for the lake instead of the mountain. After all, if the water was safe for humans, they could all go for a swim. The trio set off and found what looked to be empty homes, some buildings that  _ could _ be shops, a few restaurants that just needed stocking up and customers, and other places that looked all but ready to be populated by people stuck on the ground and people who could fly. There was a warehouse full of Focuses, cameras, and replicas of every robot or project that Danny and Tucker had ever put together before, along with a few that stored Fentonworks non-violent products too. “This place looks like someone’s fantasy dream town where you can sit, relax, chat up a ghost, and then head off into the unknown in your very own - oh wow, Danny is that the Specter Speeder?”

“Well, I may have gone over Mom and Dad’s blueprints a while back for it, but only because I wanted to see if I could develop ya know, a space ship from it.” Danny felt his cheeks burning and gave Tucker’s shoulder a light punch to try and wipe the grin off his face. “Shut up.”

“Actually, the closer we get to the forest, the more ‘port town’ vibes I’m getting,” Sam mused. “Danny, didn’t you say you wanted to be a pirate once when you were a kid?”

“Shut uuup, noo.” Danny pulled his hood over his face, even as he turned invisible. Ok, so maybe it  _ did _ look like the perfect place for a pirate who hit land on an undiscovered island to have set up their own little town. That proved nothing.

Just as Sam opened her mouth to keep teasing him, Danny popped into visibility and transformed entirely, shooting into the air with plasma gathered in his hands. It felt like the pull of some massive celestial object focused on him and his sanctuary alone, getting closer and closer, and Danny was all but certain he couldn’t do much on his own against it. He reached into his Sanctuary, felt it reach back, and begged it to  _ hide _ . The partly cloudy sky went dark, the clouds now stretching over the whole expanse of the island, and in the mountain, Danny could feel the hum of railguns warming up and ready to fire like Danny couldn’t on his own.

The clouds were parted by something vast and incomprehensible that sung every song never known by mortal ears, and looking at it was looking upon all that had ever happened throughout the whole of humanity, listening to every story ever told to another person, and Danny nearly unraveled before he could look away. Something like a bell tolled and that massive shape resolved itself into something steadily smaller and simpler, while a voice called out to them - when had Tucker and Sam joined in him in the air? - with a deep baritone voice. “ ** _A̸̢̦̮̥͚h̴͉̟̳͙͈͎̩͡, my sincerest apologies! I hadn’t expecte_ ** _ d any mortals or bridge spirits to be here and so came to investigate this lovely new place in an old _ er form. Perhaps this is easier on your minds and senses?”

The being settled into the shape of a male presenting person with grey skin, a white shirt, black pants, and a purple trench coat. They were also wearing glasses over eyes that were green at a glance but any lingering eye contact showed every shade of green and violet that could be thought of, and Danny struggled to keep his gaze on the center of the being’s forehead. They smiled with shark-like teeth and held out a hand. Danny, after likely too long, regained enough sense to shake their hand and cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah, this is uh, this is a lot easier. Hi. I’m Danny.”

“Hello Danny, I’m recently going by Ghostwriter! And who might you all be?”

“I’m …. Tucker Foley. Tech master extraordinaire.” Tucker shook off his awe quickly enough and gave the Ghostwriter some finger guns and a grin, shaky as it may have been.

Tucker’s joke seemed to snap Sam out of her own stupor and she shook the ghost’s hand warily. “Sam Manson, curious to meet you.”

“It’s always good to be curious! I came here sensing both a new place to learn about, the gateway to this lovely little planar system, and also I sensed a curious mind like my own seeking new fascinating secrets to uncover. Considering only one of you is capable of creating a Sanctuary, I imagine it’s you, Danny?”

Danny nodded and scratched the back of his neck. “Uh, about you coming here, can I ask uh, what was up with that mind-melting form you were just in?”

“I’ve never properly understood Lovecraftian Horror’s until now,” Sam muttered with a shiver. Tucker elbowed her in the side.

Ghostwriter tapped their chin with a hum and looked around at Danny’s spooktacular bachelor pad and clapped his hands with a grin. “I propose a trade! If I tell you about myself, as the answer to your question is best answered with story, then you all tell me about  _ your _ selves. Deal?”

The trio looked between each other and nodded, Danny holding out his hand to shake. “Deal. Can we take this to the cafe down there though?” Danny pointed exactly to one of the cafes in his Sanctuary and slowly relaxed his panicked grip on the place. If Ghostwriter wanted trouble he clearly didn’t want any with Danny.

They sat down, Danny found some tea, coffee and all the things required to make hot chocolate inside, and offered everyone. Tucker accepted some iced tea, while Sam and Ghostwriter got coffee, and soon Danny sat down with his own hot chocolate and everyone else’s drinks. They appreciated the drinks and took big sips before the Ghostwriter began to speak.

“Oh, but where to start, where to start? If you have time, I can start even at the very beginning of it all?” The trio looked between each other and shrugged; it was the weekend, they had plenty of time. Ghostwriter seemed delighted by that. “The very beginning it is!” Music began to play, soft and mysterious in their minds.

“Before all that you see around you, before the swirling mists and oceans of darkness, before the very concept of Being, nothing was all that was. No past, present or future, no light or darkness, simply a blank nothingness.” On the table, a portion of the air became… empty, in a way that Danny felt in his soul, and he ached to fill the void. “Now, no one, not even myself or my siblings, knows why what happened happened, but for whatever reason or unreason, something began to Exist. Now, the very first something is what some call ectoplasm, others magic, and countless other names, but my siblings and I simply refer to it as the Realms themself being born.” Green light shone in the center of the void and quickly expanded to fill it up, accompanied by glorious and triumphant music.

“Now, while the Realms were the Something to all the Nothing at its edges, it still had just about nothing in it. So, it got to making things within itself from itself, and after a bit of experimenting with half-formed ideas like any creative soul, the very first Realm - the first universe was created. Inside of this universe, there was a great deal and the forces that be happened to be rather proud of themself but had no one to share their creation with. So, they created a soul, and a vessel to house that soul in so that someone could experience what they had made. There was, however, the issue of longevity, which was solved somewhat easily enough, by moving the soul into yet another vessel.”

The shape of a person appeared, surrounded by others, and a light slid out of one as they fell, before being nudged into the next, back and forth. “Now, what with the flexibility of how the Realms interact with time, the soul of their creation was able to hop from mortal vessel to mortal vessel, back and forth across history. Each time the soul left a body it simply went to the edges of the universe before being guided to its next life. And so it went until all the mortals were gone, but the soul was now so complex from experiencing life as every mortal that it could fit in larger vessels from which to appreciate the world. So, they became each planet in turn, and then each star, and each galaxy and cluster, and black hole, until that universe finally went dark, and the being had been everyone and everything in it across its lifespan.”

The light grew brighter and brighter with each leap it took until it burrowed down deep enough to contain that light, and the images Ghostwriter showed them zoomed out to show a solar system. And from there, the light flowed all around it, even jumping to other systems, until the light was too bright to contain in those planets and so it became all the light there was. Abruptly there wasn’t any light at all. An emptiness that the soul grew and grew to fill.

“And so in the cold, dark, quiet of the seemingly dead universe, the being that experienced Existing in a way the Realms could not did what it hadn’t the chance to between all its various lives with their fresh starts and clean slated beginnings: remembered. They experienced all that they had gone through, the scope of their life unfolding to be felt in its entirety in a way that could only be done when unbound by flesh and stone and plasma confines.”

The darkness shrunk as the grey light grew, and then the darkness was a ball within a green expanse. “And then they Were, and the universe ended with a bang, as they who I call mother and you can refer to as Queen Death, was born into the Realms properly.” The ball cracked and trembled before exploding in all directions, the bits of the cosmic eggshell being tossed to the edges of what they could see on the table. A being outlined in grey that held every color there was within, spun around in excitement, and reached out, taking one of the fractured shells of her egg and molding it like clay into another ball, then doing the same with another.

For a long moment, the trio stared at the little queen Death making universes all around her, Tucker sipping his tea as he did so. While Danny was still processing and Sam struggled to find her words, Tucker set his cup down and cleared his throat. “So, there’s a lot to unpack there, and I presume that you’re one of those souls that finished maturing inside of their universe - what are your pronouns by the way?”

“Ah yes, those, I go by he and him for now.”

Tucker nodded and hummed. “So there’s a Queen of the afterlife then? Queen Death?” Ghostwriter’s face fell from that of an eager storyteller to something sour, bitter, and full of grief.

“Not anymore, sadly. Once Mother had adjusted to Being, she realized that she too could create in this wonderful place from which she came. She crafted for herself a lovely palace made half from concepts rather than stone or metal or wood, though it was made from all that and more too.” Death was shown molding the very mist around her into an intricate and beautiful landscape and building, before stopping and sitting cross-legged in her throne, tapping her chin. “But Death knew something was missing from her experience, something she’d had once before: companionship.”

Death was shown leaving her castle to go and gather the broken bits of her eggshell, and took them into her palace, before splitting one shell chunk in two and twisting the two into eggs. Green light gathered in each of her palms and flowed into the shells. “Mother made my eldest siblings, who would go on to name themselves Entropy and Peace. Unlike with her own experience with being guided into each new life, mother decided her first children would have a less lonely experience.” Blue light flowed from one egg and golden to the other and back, with the guiding hand of Death.

“Peace and Entropy would know each other in a way few still living gods do, for they were each other at times. And when they emerged, they gazed upon Death’s palace and kingdom with wonder, and they were a happy family.” Blue and Gold silhouettes hatched from their eggs, both donning violet. The three laughed and hugged and danced, crafting and playing. “And Death, and the Realms, decided to create again, and this time they would act together. And this time,” Ghostwriter said with a chill in his voice and his drink boiling, “the Realms would act on their fascination with balance.”

A violet light appeared as Death molded an egg all her own, and it pulsed and dripped with what felt to be oddly malicious. Entropy and Peace went about exploring their mother’s world while this happened and even took a few discarded shells to craft a universe of their own. Death and her children soon went about covering the table in art and Realms, along with Realms simply spawning from nowhere. The dark purple egg hatched, and the other universes shook.

“What if I told you that the force that brought Existence into Being made mistakes? What if I told you that gods can die?” Ghostwriter gestured to seven eggs orbiting each other, bands of light flitting between them all. “The third child of Death called himself War, and he was the first to disrupt things and give Peace a job to do.” War walked over and flicked the bands of light between two of the eggs, forcing the soul out into the Infinite Realms early, and it grew into a small green being. Peace flew over, and gently nudged the being back toward its egg, but not before drawing from within a blade and cutting through the tiny being. It returned to a ball shape and flowed back in.

“Ghosts of the dead, as you might call them, are souls set adrift from the path between lives, and Peace made it his job to take them back where they go. Sometimes War did this many times at once, and I, curious, asked Peace to allow a few to stay. After all, they were going to end up here again anyway, weren’t they? And so, we tried that, and due to the boundlessness and chaotic nature of the Realms these ghosts found themselves evolving and mutating over time, some of them fulfilling a passion from their previous life and finding their way back home into the next life, while others stayed here and grew and grew and even figured out a way to reproduce - sexually and not. Those ghosts born in the Realms from the dead we call Deathless because they never died.”

“So you’re the reason we have ghosts and stuff?” Sam frowned at the Ghostwriter and the story unfolding before their eyes froze. “Because you wanted to see what’d happen?”

“The name I first took was Curiosity, my dear, and actually I was the first ghost, made rather curious for a reason. It was something new. If I may?”

“Sorry.” The writer waved it off and the story continued.

“Peace forged a sword within himself that he used to set free souls that had gone too long outside of their shells, their minds dissolving under the pressure of an eternity they weren’t mature enough for yet. Many of the elder Deathless he granted such Peace granting tools, and so when a ghost went mad with age they were cut down and their soul returned to their egg. But if that were the last of War’s troublesome and destructive actions, this tale would have a happier ending.”

The violet War wrapped himself in black and red and forged within himself a ring and from that ring beat drums and played bagpipes and ripped chords that called out to something burning hot inside of Danny that had his chocolate evaporating out of his cup. “A god or a ghost can craft from themselves an artifact of power that embodies their very self, their greatest passion. Peace acted as a knight to Queen Death, while Entropy became the watcher over things, and War… War crafted his own place, a fortress beyond our immediate sight, and started taking ghosts there.”

War took the tiny green ghosts far from the others and brandished his ring at them, and from it a sickly purple light seeped out and infected the ghosts, turning them a toxic looking blend of green and purple. Danny shivered, and Sam set down her coffee, looking pale and furious. “Before we knew what he was doing, we thought of War simply as seeking conflict, as his name implied. But war, oh war is not just violence, it is _imperialism,_ it is **slaughter**, **_it is conquest_** **_it is a͜ h҉un̵g̸er̶ ̸th҉at ca̴nnot be sat̶ed ųnt͜i̷l ͜all͢ i͏s͝ c̸o̡ns͢umęd ̕an͏d̴ ̕li̷k͝e͞l̢y̕ ev͜en͢ ͟not t҉he̛n._**” The sickly purple and red light spread further and further, seeping into the ground and choking the air.

“When the dead forge artifacts that outlast them, they make them from the ectoplasm of the Realms and have them resonate with that ghost’s soul, thus allowing any Dead, Deathless, or even a living mortal with the same soul or at least born of the same soul as the ghost who made it to use it. When one of  _ us  _ does it though, well, we’ve got a universe worth of energy to work with, replenished by the Realms, so we reach inside and forge our relic from our own soul, and a bit of ectoplasm. Queen Death made her crown of Fire as a light to keep back the darkness, and to assist her in managing the ebb and flow of souls across the cosmos.”

The palace courtroom came into view and violet War marched forth toward his mother, his purple and red, and black ring pulsing with the beat of wrath. “As her Majesty Queen Death put to work her latest project of making systems out of Realms that would regulate themselves, her third eldest child marched into her throne room with a ring made from the collective heat and metals of stars within him, his malice, his corruptive hunger that would take and steal and conquer, and he stole from her what was her own, the Crown of Fire that lit the darkness of the Infinite Realms, and with a sword stolen from a Peacemaker he earned his most hatefully spat title, the Filthy Mother Killer.“ The kaleidoscopic crown atop Death’s head turned sickly and purple-green. A sword the color of bone pierced Death’s center and the whole Sanctuary shook with a screech.

“Peace ran to mother's palace to ask what had happened, for all the Realms felt it when Death died, and oh, how realization crashed down upon that which could call itself the Realms themself, and oh how it wept and oh how it raged, as the sword that would cut free the souls lost and tangled in obsession too deeply to pass onto their next lives alone and gave the infant Realms peaceful deaths was used to reach into Peace itself and oh how the Realms wailed with fury as the Fright Knight was forced into being under the service of the Usurper, and struck even his sibling Entropy, now Clockwork, giving them their famed scar.” Gold was encased in bone white armor and it’s violet cloak ignited. They struck blue Entropy and soon the gods all over clashed, and the tabletop was swallowed by a rainbow of violence and dripped with emerald blood.

“And so, the Corrupter of Worlds threw the Realms into the most horrific war, beyond mortal comprehension, as the gods grieved and raged and fought with all they had, but could barely scratch their elder brothers. Until finally, finally, Clockwork sealed Fright Knight away in the nightmares his sword now caused. And finally, Entropy itself rallied their brothers and sisters and we sealed away the vile Mother Killer in the Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep.” Ghostwriter banished the images, his eyes burning amethyst and crimson and he took deep breaths, while the teens leaned back, wary and filled with their own impotent rage.

When finally he seemed to calm, the Sanctuary not writhing and rumbling with the force of his rage, he did a little gesture and the mist coalesced once more into a little stage. A foundation of stone formed and over it lay an ocean and from within it grew a tree of bark and steel, surrounded by breezes likely large enough to dwarf Jupiter’s red spot, mold growing at the bottom of the tree while a star roared to life above it. “Though War was locked away, the Realms did not know rest. So they set to work putting together their daughter's last project: a planar system. And ages beyond time passed, until one day, every god and spirit woke to the sound of a scream. And that, my dear Bridge Spirit, is where I believe your story begins.”

Danny sat there, turning over the story that he’d just been told in his head, and tried his best to process it. He wasn’t sure how to do that, though, with the enormity of it all. So, Tucker cut in for him, like always, but with a rap. “Yo, Danny Fenton, he was just 14-“

“Ai dios- stop!” Danny snorted a laugh and shoved Tucker’s face, and the trio descended into a fit of giggles. “Alright, my story isn’t as  _ much _ as yours is, but, well.” And so, taking turns picking up where the others didn’t know, they told their story to the Ghostwriter. They could process the meaning of life later.

**Author's Note:**

> Alright this one involves a serious issue that I wanted to do SOMETHING about and I did sign petitions and donate some money but writing is what i do and if this helps spread awareness then so be it cause our lungs are burning and we need those.


End file.
